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It used to be that reading books made you an intellectual. In the age of TikTok and shorts being able to watch a movie for 2 hours makes you an intellectual.
by avgDev 1mo ago
It used to be that reading books made you an intellectual. In the age of TikTok and shorts being able to watch a movie for 2 hours makes you an intellectual.
- Waterluvian 1mo agoWhat if I watch a movie in 56 two minute clips while someone extrudes playdoh in the corner?
- schaefer 1mo agoPlus those shorts are out of order. So it’s gotta take more effort to piece the plot back together, right? :)
- sreekanth67 1mo agolol. someone make this app please.
- ryoshoe 1mo agoMaybe this could even work better for non-chronological movies like Memento
- Waterluvian 1mo agoExactly. It’s like making every movie Tenet. I have to actively watch and piece together the plot.
- cube00 1mo agoI watched a mother completely glued to her phone holding it 6 inches away from her face while her teen daughter was trying to talk to her. The mother would not look away from her phone while she sort of tried to answer her. Truely heartbreaking to watch.
- CuriouslyC 1mo agoReading might not make you intellectual, but if you read because you thought it made you intellectual, it definitely made you insufferable.
- jdgoesmarching 1mo agoI’d posit that we just puritanically glorify anything perceived as difficult, regardless of the correlation with “intellect.” I’m fine not having the same attention span as people who had to less stuff to do hundreds of years ago.
- throwaway613746 1mo ago[dead]
- bogwog 1mo agoWatching a 2 hour movie is perceived as difficult? > I'm fine not having the same attention span as people who had to less stuff to do hundreds of years ago. Maybe, if we're really generous, there's a reasonable version of this argument that you've failed to adequately communicate here... But it really seems like you're trying to say that a short attention span is a good sign of progress, or something? I know HN and SV in general has a culty addiction to contrarianism, and it rarely elicits more than an eye roll from me. Framing a short attention span as anything other than a bad thing is wild to me, and I honestly don't know how to respond to something like that (or if my sarcasm detector is off). Do we need scientific studies to show that goldfish brain == bad?
- jdgoesmarching 1mo agoI was being glib because “attention span” is a poorly defined concept that people are more interested in deriding than understanding, as you demonstrate with your comment that we don’t need science to know that it’s bad. I’m specifically criticizing the tendency to ascribe virtue to tediousness while passing it off as psychology. After a lifetime of having to prove that my ADHD doesn’t make me a drag on society, call me skeptical of people who insist they know what makes a brain objectively worse than another based on vibes. It’s one thing to discuss the impact of tuning an algorithm to be addictive, it’s another to make a claim that a preference for one form of media over another is a Problem. Ironically, I’m a pretty heavy reader and find it funny that people treat reading like some paragon of mental discipline when it’s just the media that I find stimulating. I absolutely have a much shorter “attention span” than most people who primarily consume short form video.
- mstaoru 1mo agoHave you seen how they watch movies in China? Collectively, with hundreds of real-time comments flying over the screen.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1mo agoExample? I'm fascinated.
- mstaoru 1mo agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFtXk3Fm4s8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFtXk3Fm4s8
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1mo agohttps://theonion.com/man-binge-watches-entire-movie-in-one-sitting/ https://theonion.com/man-binge-watches-entire-movie-in-one-s...